THE OMEN.*

[Blackwood's Magazine, July, 1824.]

THE Muse of Fiction has of late considerably extended her walk; and it will probably be admitted, that she has lent her counsel to authors of greater powers, and more extended information, than those who detailed the uninteresting Memoirs of Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy, and the like tiresome persons. The grave humour of Fieldingthe broad comedy of Smollett-the laboured pathos of Richardson-the sentiment of Mackenzie and Sterne-are of course excluded from this comparison. But even these distinguished authors seem to have limited the subjects of fictitious composition to imaginary incidents in private life, and to displaying the influence of the ordinary passions of mankind-the world in which they and their readers lived, could show parallel instances of the adventures narrated, and characters to match in some degree with the personages introduced. But the modern novelists, compelled by the success of their predecessors, to abandon a field where the harvest was exhausted, have, many of them, chosen elsewhere subjects of a different description. We have now novels, which may take the old dramatic term of Chronicles; bringing real and often exalted persons on the stage; adorning historical events with such ornaments as their imagination can suggest; introducing fictitious characters among such as are real, and assigning to those which are historical, qualities, speeches, and actions, which exist only in the writer's fancy. These historical novels may operate advantageously on the mind of two classes of readers; first, upon those whose attention to history is awakened by the fictitious narrative, and whom curiosity stimulates to study, for the purpose of winnowing the wheat from the chaff,

*The Omen. By JOHN GALT, Esq.

the true from the fabulous. Secondly, those who are too idle to read, save for the purpose of amusement, may in these works acquire some acquaintance with history, which, however inaccurate, is better than none. If there is a third class, whose delight in history is liable to be lessened by becoming habituated to the fairy-land of fiction, it must be confessed, that to them the historical romance or novel runs risk of doing much harm. But the readers liable to suffer by this perversion, are supposed to be but few in number, or, indeed to merge almost entirely in the second class, since the difference is but nominal betwixt those who read novels, because they dislike history-and those who dislike history, because they read novels.

It is not, however, of historical novels that we are now about to speak, but of another species of these productions which has become popular in the present day, and of which the interest turns less upon the incidents themselves, than upon the peculiar turn of mind of the principal personage who is active or passive under them, and which character is not, like Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, a picture improved from nature, but has something in it so exaggerated, as to approach the verge of the grotesque or unnatural. In such works, it is the character of the individual, not the events of the tale, which constitute the charm of the writing.

There is a strong resemblance betwixt the novel of character, and what was called, in the seventeenth century, plays of humour, when the interest consisted in observing how particular incidents worked upon those of the dramatis persona, to whom was assigned a natural or acquired peculiarity of sentiment and taste, which made them consider matters under a different light from that in which they appeared to mankind in general. The Morose of Ben Johnson, whose passion it is to have everything silent around him, the Volpone, and almost all the principal characters of that able and learned dramatist, are influenced by some over-mastering humour, which, like the supposed influence of the planet under which he was born, sways and biases the individual, and makes him unlike to the rest of his species even in the events most common to humanity.

Mr. Goodwin has been one of the masters in the novel of character-a title which we rather choose than that of

humour, which has now acquired an almost exclusive comic meaning. The morbid sensibility of Fleetwood, and the restless speculating curiosity of Caleb Williams, are instances of his talent in that department. There is, perhaps, little general sympathy with the overstrained delicacies of Fleetwood, who, like Falkland in the School for Scandal, is too extravagant in his peculiarities to deserve the reader's pity. On the other hand, few there are who do not enter into and understand the workings of the mind of Caleb Williams, where the demon of curiosity, finding a youth of an active and speculative disposition, without guide to advise, or business to occupy him, engages his thoughts and his time upon the task of prying into a mystery which no way concerned him, and which from the beginning he had a well-founded conviction might prove fatal to him, should he ever penetrate it. The chivalrous frenzy of Falkland, in the same piece, though perhaps awkwardly united with the character of an assassin, that love of fame to which he sacrifices honour and virtue, is another instance of a humour, or turn of mind, which, like stained glass, colours with its own peculiar tinge every object beheld by the party.

In the elegant little volume which forms the subject of this article, we find another example of the novel of character, and indisputably a good one. The theme which he has chosen, as predominating in his hero's mind, a youth of a gentle, melancholy, abstracted disposition, is a superstition as connected with an anxious and feverish apprehension of futurity-a feeling which, though ridiculed at one time, reasoned down at another, and stubbornly denied upon all, has, in one shape or other, greater weight with most men than any is willing to admit of himself, or ready to believe in another.

Men of the most different habits and characters in other respects, resemble each other in the practice of nursing in secret some pet superstition, the belief of which, though often painful to them, they cherish the more fondly in secret, that they dare not for shame avow it in public; so that many more people than the world in general is aware of, hold similar opinions with that of a distinguished sea-officer of our acquaintance, who, having expressed his general disbelief of all the legends of Davy Jones, Flying Dutchmen,

and other mystic terrors of the deep, summed up his general infidelity on the subject with these qualifying words,one would not, to be sure, whistle in a gale of wind."

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The reader will easily imagine that we do not allude to the superstition of the olden time, which believed in spectres, fairies, and other supernatural apparitions. These airy squadrons have been long routed, and are banished to the cottage and the nursery. But there exists more than one species of superstition entirely distinct from that which sees phantoms, a disease or weakness of the mind—not to be cured by Dr. Alderson, or analyzed by Dr. Hibbertamongst which is pre-eminent that which supposes our mind receives secret intimations of futurity by accidents which appear mysteriously indicative of coming events, by impulses to which the mind seems involuntarily subjected, and which seem less to arise from its own reflections, than to be stamped and impressed on the thoughts by the agency of some separate being;-this constitutes the peculiar superstition of the hero of the Omen. The events which he meets are all of a natural and ordinary character in themselves; it is the sensations of the augur by whom they are interpreted, which give them an ominous character.

This tendency to gaze beyond the curtain which divides us from futurity, has been the weakness of many distinguished names. Buonaparte secretly believed in the influence of his star-Byron had more than one point of superstitious faith-Sheridan had that horror of doing anything on a Friday, which is yet common among the vulgar; and he took his late son Tom away from Dr. Parr's school, because he had dreamed he had fallen from a tree and broken his neck. Other instances might be produced: some are no doubt affected, because to entertain a strange and peculiar belief on particular subjects, looks like originality of thinking, or, at least, attracts attention, like the wearing a new and whimsical dress in order to engage public notice. But those whom we have named were too proud, and stood too high to have recourse to such arts; they are the genuine disciples, to a certain extent, of the mystic philosophy which the author of the Omen thus describes.

Why are we so averse to confess to one another, how much we in secret acknowledge to ourselves, that we believe the mind to be endowed with other faculties of perception than those of

the corporeal senses? We deride with worldly laughter the fine enthusiasm of the conscious spirit that gives heed and credence to the metaphorical intimations of prophetic reverie, and we condemn as superstition the faith which consults the omens and oracles of dreams; and yet, who is it that has not in the inscrutable abysses of his own bosom an awful worshipper, bowing the head, and covering the countenance, as the dark harbingers of destiny, like the mute and slow precursors of the hearse, marshal the advent of a coming woe?

"It may be that the soul never sleeps, and what we call dreams, are but the endeavours which it makes during the trance of the senses, to reason by the ideas of things associated with the forms and qualities of those whereof it then thinks. Are not, indeed, the visions of our impressive dreams often but the metaphors with which the eloquence of the poet would invest the cares and anxieties of our waking circumstances and rational fears? But still the spirit sometimes receives marvellous warnings; and have we not experienced an unaccountable persuasion, that something of good or evil follows the visits of certain persons, who, when the thing comes to pass, are found to have had neither affinity with the circumstances, nor influence on the event? The hand of the horologe indexes the movements of the planetary universe; but where is the reciprocal enginery between them?

"These reflections into which I am perhaps too prone to fall, partake somewhat of distemperature and disease, but they are not therefore the less deserving of solemn consideration.-The hectical flush, the palsied hand, and the frenzy of delirium, are as valid, and as efficacious in nature, to the fulfilment of providential intents, as the glow of health, in the masculine arm, and the sober inductions of philosophy.-Nor is it wise, in considering the state and frame of man, to overlook how much the universal element of disease affects the evolutions of fortune. often babbles truths which make wisdom wonder."

Madness

The facts by which this theory is illustrated are few and simple. The author is one of those whose "sense of being is derived from the past;" who do not look forward to form splendid pictures of the future, but dote, with the constancy of infatuation, on those which exist in the gallery of memory. He does not form his conjectures of the future by comparing it with that which is present, but by auguries derived from events long passed, and deeply engraved upon the tablets of recollection.

These are of a solemn mystic air and tragic character. His infant years recall a vision of a splendid mansion, disturbed by signs of wo and violence, and the joyous remembrances of his childish play are interrupted by recollection of a wounded gentleman, and a lady distracted by sorrow. VOL. II.-5